Appreciation: Remembering Boston theater legend TOMMY DERRAH

The greater Boston theater community is mourning the death of one of its own: actor, director and teacher, Tommy Derrah, at age 64.

Derrah died last Thursday night after battling lung cancer that was diagnosed less than three months ago. Few people knew of his illness.

Two weeks after his July surgery to remove the cancer, Derrah and John Kuntz, his husband of more than 10 years, left for a long-planned teaching gig in China.

“He had so looked forward to this trip,” said Kuntz, a Cohasset native. “We went to China together to teach acting and mount a 45-minute version of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ with the students. Tommy could never sit still. He wanted to feel vital. He loved traveling, he loved working, he loved theater,” Kuntz said.

Derrah was a longtime faculty member at Harvard Extension School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in addition to his nearly 40-yearlong career as a performer. Kuntz, a graduate of Cohasset High School, teaches opera singers to move and dancers to speak as a professor in the theater department at Boston Conservatory of Music and is also an actor and a playwright. The pair were longtime residents of Cambridge.

Derrah’s name on a show program signaled a must-see evening in the theater for his legion of family and friends. A highly gifted character actor, during just the past few years on stage he morphed from a devoted husband who secretly dressed in women’s clothes on weekends (“Casa Valentina”) to a homeless man (“Grand Concourse,” both at SpeakEasy Stage) to a grinning, wriggling python, draped in an outrageous costume (“The Jungle Book,” Huntington Theater). In “Necessary Monsters,” also at SpeakEasy Stage, he played an entitled, outspoken woman in a business suit for his first role in a play by Kuntz, another member of the cast. For the first half of the play, Derrah lay prone and motionless on the floor until he jumped to his feet and delivered an unforgettable monologue. Paul Daigneault, artistic director of SpeakEasy Stage, recalled, “how fiercely passionate he was about each and every play he did for me … He just knew how to get inside a character.”

Derrah also appeared in 23 different roles in the production of “Jackie: An American Life” on Broadway, and in the feature films, “Mystic River” and “Pink Panther 2.”

Thomas Lendall Derrah was born in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in 1953. After graduating from high school, he finished his undergraduate degree at the University of Southern Maine and earned a graduate degree from the Yale School of Drama.

Robert Brustein, former dean at Yale, started the American Repertory Theater at Harvard and hired Derrah as a founding member of the company where he performed in 119 productions after coming to Boston.

No one who followed Derrah’s succession of roles at Loeb Drama Center will forget him as Vanya in “Uncle Vanya,” Clov in “Endgame” or the Marquis de Sade in “Marat/Sade,” but this reviewer’s favorite was seeing him play Captain Trash in “Ubu Rock.” He rocked the second act number – “The Button Song” – to expose the underlying brutality of the character, despite the sardonic humor of the piece.

“He was a fellow of infinite depth and unusual modesty, a genuinely transforming artist. We shall not look upon his like again,” Brustein said.

In looking back over their long relationship and marriage, Kuntz remarked, “Tommy was a wonderful figure but I think we have it backwards. He was a wonderful, generous and kind human being. He was a beautiful person that enabled him to be a great artist.”

In addition to Kuntz, Derrah is survived by his brother, Robert Derrah and wife, Joan, and his sister Bette-Lou Scott and husband, Gregg, his nieces and nephews and many close friends. A visitation will be held from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Friday, in the Story Chapel at the Mount Auburn Cemetery, concluding with a service of remembrance at 7 p.m.